View Full Version : Old slides and negatives
I just located all the old slides and other photo stuff at my parents' house and mailed them back to myself and have spent the last several days culling slides. I went from over a thousand to 376, and my son and dil helped yesterday with the final culling.
They said digitize them professionally. I had been leaning towards getting a scanner myself, but they said the pros could do a better job more cheaply, and be done with it. That's my first question--what would you do now, just take them to be digitalized and then be done with them for a while? I would print favorites out for albums because that is how I like to see my photographs.
The other issue is old negatives. I have some really old negatives, circa 1918, and even some glass plate negatives from family in Nebraska. What do you all recommend with these very old negatives? We didn't even deal with these yet, just finished the slides.
How do I give these to the pros to digitize without losing my organizational system, which right now is baggies with different categories and the number of slides within?
I probably have some more recent negatives, from the 50's, but I would probably discard those. . .
Anybody done this, and have suggestions?
iris lilies
11-8-21, 8:27am
No suggestions, but wow, what a job you are taking on to deal with all of this content in differing forms!
No suggestions, but wow, what a job you are taking on so deal with all of this content in differing forms!
I think I will actually take the slides to Portland to this photographic place that will digitize them, and then I can ask them about the negatives! Will concentrate on slides for now, then printing them out for albums and maybe some prints for the wall.
Gee, whiz, we are living in parallel universes. In NJ, the last box I retrieved was another shoe box of photos, but when I looked inside is was all negatives! I almost tossed it, knowing I would probably never do anything with it, but now I'm anxious to see how your visit with the Portland photo studio goes, and then decide if it will be worth it for professionals to digitize mine.
Gee, whiz, we are living in parallel universes. In NJ, the last box I retrieved was another shoe box of photos, but when I looked inside is was all negatives! I almost tossed it, knowing I would probably never do anything with it, but now I'm anxious to see how your visit with the Portland photo studio goes, and then decide if it will be worth it for professionals to digitize mine.
The one I found is a chain, and they have one in Burlington:
https://everpresent.com/our-locations/northern-vermont/
I will let you know if I get hold of them and what they charge.
There is a mail-off one for 37cents a slide, ScanCafe, which I was going to use. But I'd rather take them in and talk to somebody.
When we found boxes of old negatives a few years back, DH used his photo scanner and spent hours downloading them to Dropbox and as a backup to an external HD. Who knows though if any of this stuff will be around even 20 yrs from now? He found that the local photo stores were very expensive and that some of the really old negatives were of a size they wouldn't or couldn't do. It was a good wintertime activity to scan them all.
Good point about the winter activity! Here is an article about using your phone to scan negatives?? I need to check this out. Catherine, maybe you could try this and do a cursory and then pay to scan the best ones, but discard first? Not sure.
https://www.thefamilyheart.com/scan-negatives-with-your-phone/
ETA: I can't see the picture, Catherine?
catherine
11-8-21, 10:56am
Good point about the winter activity! Here is an article about using your phone to scan negatives?? I need to check this out. Catherine, maybe you could try this and do a cursory and then pay to scan the best ones, but discard first? Not sure.
https://www.thefamilyheart.com/scan-negatives-with-your-phone/
ETA: I can't see the picture, Catherine?
By mistake I uploaded the wrong screenshot! Then couldn't delete the thumbnail, so I deleted the whole post. Anyway, thank you for the reference to the Burlington photo shop!!
ETA: here's that photo I meant to upload: My MIL (left) and DH, and the woman on the right is probably my MIL's best friend from Scotland, who just died a couple of months ago at age 95. As I said in the deleted post, I just like this picture for its composition and totally 50s vibe, with the car and the stylish 50s outfits. My MIL used to say that her friends said she always dressed like a store mannequin.
4062
iris lilies
11-8-21, 11:28am
Catherine that photo is wonderful!!!
Teacher Terry
11-8-21, 1:44pm
Cool picture Catherine! I am no help with the slides or pictures as we just threw them away.
It sure is! To think about chasing after a toddler in those shoes!
Wonderful Photo! Had to go back and check out the shoes after the comment about toddler and shoes.
I recently scanned in many thousands of *prints* with a nice scanner that would allow me to put in stacks of 32 or so, and that did a reasonable job at automatically color-correcting them and removing dust/scratches.
I have a lot of old slides and negatives that I'd like to scan in at some point. Whenever I've investigated services that do so, the cost has been prohibitive for my volume. I am waiting until I feel motivated to purchase a decent film/slide scanner that can do bulk production work, it's not a terribly urgent project. The technology and software are improving quite a bit every year, and the price is dropping, so patience may produce better results.
This is all a bit easier now that I have a data storage and workflow setup for images for my astrophotography work, so I can semi-automate some of the necessary edit stages if required.
Your astrophotagraphy work is gorgeous, and I imagine you are getting several photoproduction tools as you progress.
Is there a cheap basic slide scanner you would recommend, more for the personal archiving standpoint? That was where I started, thinking I would get a slide scanner first, then involve the professional scanners--but then we discarded a lot and are down to a much smaller number.
Still, I like ordering them and cataloguing them at home, as I can plug along and think about what I am seeing.
Another option: This popped up on FB--they're eavesdropping again. Not sure if it's useful or affordable, but it's interesting.
https://www.familyhistoryhero.com
I've also seen iPhone scanning apps that make "scanning" as simple as taking a picture of the pictures.
happystuff
11-9-21, 10:36am
I actually got this brand of just photo scanner years ago. Apparently they also make scanners for slides and negatives:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/255205168468?chn=ps&_trkparms=ispr%3D1&amdata=enc%3A1xx0hX6PDRh-VtijIgRkCsw0&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=255205168468&targetid=1262843334889&device=c&mktype=pla&googleloc=9004037&poi=&campaignid=12873834463&mkgroupid=121736098545&rlsatarget=pla-1262843334889&abcId=9300536&merchantid=6296724&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_LKO4r6L9AIVnQaICR2uFAKXEAQYAiAB EgK2VvD_BwE
Not very expensive, but I know mine - while being VERY low tech and easy to use - works well. I also use it to digitize documents and other paperwork I need to email, etc.
I have an older but relatively expensive consumer grade scanner (Epson 2450) and have used it to scan slides and negatives from 35mm, 120 and 4X5 film. I does an acceptable job, but when I inherited a bunch of family slides I went with a professional scanning service. Depending on one's level of quality acceptance the cheaper home scanners just don't deliver the quality I would like to preserve family or other valuable memories, but some may differ. I might even quibble about some scanning lab quality. Home scanning is time consuming and requires dust removal and sometimes color correction and sharpening, all of which a scanning service can do with high end equipment. There just asn't much of a market for decent film scanners these days.
That looks interesting, happystuff. Rogar, I may try something simple like that and then take the keepers to be professionally scanned and corrected.
I have seen prices of 37 cents with Scan Cafe and 60 cent with Everpresent.
SteveinMN
11-12-21, 11:26pm
The suggestion I make to anyone considering a large digitization project like this is to consider where the images (or videos, whatever) are going. Physically scanning, auditing (for quality) and editing (color correction, fixing dust spots and paper damage, straightening, etc.), and cataloging the images in a way someone unknown could use to find a particular picture or those of an event or individual... It's a lot of painstaking work. You wouldn't want to do that much work only to have the hoped-for target audience sniff around it for a few hours and move on.
For that matter, not every image needs to exist ad infinitum. How many pictures are needed to give people the flavor of Uncle Al's 70th birthday? Or of Aunt Louise's succession of 4-H animals? Curation is not a bad thing. In a world inundated with images, the best ones will survive. People digitizing randomly can defeat their purpose by making the completed project a magnum opus that others avoid out of the sheer bulk.
The suggestion I make to anyone considering a large digitization project like this is to consider where the images (or videos, whatever) are going. Physically scanning, auditing (for quality) and editing (color correction, fixing dust spots and paper damage, straightening, etc.), and cataloging the images in a way someone unknown could use to find a particular picture or those of an event or individual... It's a lot of painstaking work. You wouldn't want to do that much work only to have the hoped-for target audience sniff around it for a few hours and move on.
For that matter, not every image needs to exist ad infinitum. How many pictures are needed to give people the flavor of Uncle Al's 70th birthday? Or of Aunt Louise's succession of 4-H animals? Curation is not a bad thing. In a world inundated with images, the best ones will survive. People digitizing randomly can defeat their purpose by making the completed project a magnum opus that others avoid out of the sheer bulk.
Great points, Steve. I just spent a week with the slides only and have them down from about a thousand to about 350. I have two archival boxes now and they are sorted by theme, and one box is family and the other historic Savannah. I still have more culling to do, as I now have, for example, 24 pictures of my grandparents' house. So I can probably get that down, too, but it's helping me remember things, like our 1960 station wagon.
I let my son and dil help and actually, I think they have already thrown out things that were of sentimental interest to me, but they were selecting for "best pictures" asthetically, and I was so happy to have someone helping that I let it go. They will inherit them anyway, so a little generational pre-culling is a good thing.
As to the non family pictures, I am not sure yet what I will do with them.
I can pause and not digitize anything, or go through and cull again, now that I have all the interesting ones in one place.
That sounds like great progress. I did a couple of things after I digitized my collection. I made two backups on memory sticks. I have one at home and one in a safety deposit box. I also bought a small digital picture frame that rotates photos so that I could see them more often. Any more I suppose most pads, smart TVs and computers have a slide show feature. You mentioned a couple of labs with different pricing that you're considering. I offer as a suggestion doing a test run with each before doing a big bulk order.
If you get into things a little deeper, Photoshop Elements is a decent photo editing program that can be had for maybe a hundred dollars. It can do simple things like cropping, color adjustments, changing the image size or reducing the file size for easier sharing, and possibly some basic help storing and retrieving files.
Thanks, Rogar, great advice about both back up and the editing software!
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